Wringing the most value out of social and experiential learning, however, depends on a company’s ability to centralize that knowledge somewhere. Those interactions your employees have with peers and managers are where the majority of learning on the job occurs – and their value is truly priceless. Indeed, most learning happens through interactions with peers and managers, and through on-the-job experiences and problem-solving.

In fact, social learning approaches are said to have a 75:1 ROI ratio compared to formal, web-based training activities. When you consider that measuring and determining learning ROI is a challenge that’s top of mind for many of today’s L&D professionals, the clear benefits of enabling social learning are likely the reason the majority of companies are making sure social learning is part of their learning mix (or at least plan to do so in the future).

The Digitization of Watercooler Talk Has Major Benefits

As mentioned earlier, social and experiential learning are only as effective as a company’s ability to centralize shared knowledge in a way that all employees have access to it if they choose to seek it out. This collaborative approach to learning was a main driver in the development of Docebo’s Coach & Share module, which provides users a means for fluid informal knowledge transfer and feedback from internal experts; to support learning as it happens in real life.

Each contribution learners make stays within the Coach & Share module, made available to everyone within the organization – not just those huddled around the proverbial watercooler. Companies that are able to formalize that informal knowledge will be more successful in engaging and motivating learners to share that knowledge across the organization. At the end of the day, doing so develops and mobilizes a more knowledgeable and skilled workforce that increases performance across the entire business.

Be Mindful of The ‘Bad Tagging’ Trap

Too often, learning content is tagged ineffectively (or – even worse – not tagged at all). Properly tagging learning content is absolutely crucial to making it discoverable within your learning platform, and is particularly important for content derived from social or experiential means.

Ultimately, untagged content is consumed less and risks resulting in learning gaps and confusion. Content that’s tagged the right way brings learners closer to the content they need to consume to be successful and grow with the organization, maintain pace with their training requirements, and benefit from non-mandatory content contributions derived from their peers or internal subject-matter experts.

AI is the star of Docebo’s latest product release; our learning platform’s first foray into an area of incredible and untapped potential in the learning technology space. A key component of that release is Docebo’s Invite-to-Watch functionality.

Invite-to-Watch is designed to elevate the social learning experience by ensuring that those who will value a particular piece of learning content most actually get their eyes on it. When a user uploads a piece of learning content to Coach & Share, the platform automatically produces a list of those within the organization who might find it interesting. AI (machine learning in this case) analyzes the content to produce a list of users who have shown an interest in similar assets in the past.

Doing so requires our algorithms to analyze both new content and the historic learning patterns, including content preferences of learners in the platform. As the system is fed more and more content, it becomes more and more effective at identifying patterns within the content and those who will find it most useful to produce more effective social learning experiences.

The best part? AI happens behind the scenes, without ever interrupting the learning experience for learners or any work required by administrators.

Functionalities such as Invite-to-Watch are a learning process, not a static formula – in a different, but similar context to the ways your learning activities will evolve over time. And this is a very good thing for L&D admins and their learners, as AI essentially grows alongside your learners to produce results that continue to improve over time. Are you ready to see AI-powered learning in action?

SCORM and AICC are international standard for tracking E-Learning activities. xAPI (formerly Tin Can API) is the Learning Objects new standard. The Docebo Learning Management System supports both of these standards.